Still ignoring the lessons of Ho Chi Minh

"Ho ho ho" in this month brings forth an image of the Christmas season. A rosy cheeked, white bearded gentleman in a red cap laughing with delight at the excited child on his lap. Yes, that's one vision. But at first, when those words were offered as a writing prompt for my small group of aspiring writers, my brain connected ...

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seacoastonline.com

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Posted Dec. 20, 2013 at 2:00 AM

Posted Dec. 20, 2013 at 2:00 AM

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To the Editor:

"Ho ho ho" in this month brings forth an image of the Christmas season. A rosy cheeked, white bearded gentleman in a red cap laughing with delight at the excited child on his lap. Yes, that's one vision. But at first, when those words were offered as a writing prompt for my small group of aspiring writers, my brain connected to another Ho. That one had a beard too. Scraggly it was, and he wasn't rosy cheeked and didn't wear a red hat. The "red" was part of him — internal. Yes he was red, a communist red and his name is Ho Chi Minh the leader of North Vietnam who we, in our misguided political past, refused his request for help and later, we saw him as an enemy to be fought, justifying the loss of more than 50,000 American lives. We can't count how many of his kinsmen died.

I characterize our politics at that time as "misguided" which these days appears to be an accurate appraisal.

Ho's mistake, which raised our ire, was that he didn't accept colonial rule over his people. After the occupying Japanese left at the end of World War II, the French colonialists returned. He didn't welcome them. He fought, they lost. France sought our help. We gave it. Only a little at first, but as the months dragged by, we gave more and more, feeding an insatiable appetite. Ho proved willing to bleed and sacrifice his countrymen knowing that our more fragile kind of determination would weaken and he would prevail. He was right. We were wrong. Wrong from the start.

Didn't we, our forebears, fight a colonial government to gain our freedom? Our history reports it proudly. What caused the shift in our values? The shift that these days has mired us in a series of misguided actions throughout the Middle East.

The explainers find many reasons for our present motives. All, in my opinion, have to do with external factors. By that I mean factors that are outside our commonly held beliefs in equality for all, fairness, kindness and independence.

Laying those cards on the table raises the hackles of all the "yes but" crowd and the "it depends" crowd and "it's in our best interests" crowd.